A confession

I’m going to put my hands up to making a very basic error, and one that has taken me over two years to realise.

When I visited Swansea back in August 2007 I went for the afternoon to Carmarthen. Part of the reason for going was to look at the castle, because I had heard lots of people going on about how good the castle was.

I didn’t think much of it, all there appeared to be were a couple of walls and a small bit of rampart. I thought I must have missed some really big site (to be fair I had already been to Kidwelly castle that day, and had to get back to Swansea to pick up my luggage and the train home, so I didn’t have lots of time to investigate.)

It was only with the planning of my current trip to Holyhead that it suddenly dawned on me that rather than Carmarthen castle people might have been talking about Caernarfon castle.

And yes, Caernarfon castle is spectacular.

To paraphrase a well respected Russian – Aleksandr Orlov
Carmarthen, Caernarfon, don’t even sound the same, Simples!

Doing the tourist thing

I’m going to put my hands up to doing the most stupid touristy thing I have done for a long time.

I made an assumption, which is never a good thing.

The largest body of water in the Lake District is called Windermere. There is a town in the Lake District called Windermere and it has a station in it. The station itself, shock, horror for a lot of English towns, is actually almost in the centre of the town.

Now it’s a natural conclusion to draw that therefore Windermere the town must be on the banks of Windermere the body of water.

It is from these same assumptions that people arrive at the Bodleian library in Oxford looking for Selfridges, and at the site of the 2012 Olympics looking for Shakespeare’s birth place.

No, Windermere, the town is nowhere near Windermere, the body of water. In fact it’s about two blooming miles away, which is a bit of a hefty walk when you only have an hour to get there and back to the station in.

Perhaps in future I should look at the guidebooks before making these rash decisions.